It is anticipated that some wireless communications protocols will support spectrum aggregation wherein a compliant user terminal, also referred to as user equipment (UE), will be expected to receive data on multiple component carriers in a single sub-frame. One such protocol is 3GPP LTE-Advanced (LTE-A). Existing control signaling schemes for LTE Release 8 can only be used to allocate resources to a UE on only a single Release 8 compliant carrier.
U.S. Publication 2006/0274712 entitled “Multi-carrier Operation In Data Transmission Systems” discloses a method and apparatus for preserving compatibility of legacy devices when adding multi-carrier capability to single carrier communication systems. Recent LTE RAN WG1 contributions R1-082468, R1-082380 and R1-083681 describe high level principles for resource allocation in LTE-A. These publications however do not explicitly describe a control signaling scheme.
The various aspects, features and advantages of the invention will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon a careful consideration of the following Detailed Description thereof with the accompanying drawings described below. The drawings may have been simplified for clarity and are not necessarily drawn to scale.